Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

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tonight at Bob’s instigation, a fitting tribute, and only part of tonight’s tribute, to a man who has done as much as anyone to support Cobbing’s creativity. It goes further because it could be strongly argued that, without Eric, there would be no Sub Voicive Poetry. Without Eric, I wonder what many of us would be doing now; that generative energy of Mottram’s remains in so much that we do; and it remains in what Bob Cobbing is about to present. Bob Cobbing is in his 80th year. To mark this ridiculous and splendid fact, I have offered him two readings in the one season in the firm belief that you will all support that by turning up again to hear him. At the end of the season, we shall ask him to celebrate himself. Tonight, we ask Bob to celebrate our much-missed friend and colleague, Eric Mottram. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Cobbing.
Bob Cobbing and Eric Mottram Celebration (18th Jan 2000) Tonight, Bob Cobbing gives the Eric Mottram Celebration Reading. Both men, Bob and Eric, undertook considerable amounts of the basic hard work involved in building the infrastructure, to slightly stretch the word, of what Mottram later called The British Poetry Revival. A major physical and emblematic manifestation of that hard work was the gradual but steady change in the make up of The Poetry Society’s General Council, 30 years ago; the appointment of Eric Mottram as editor of Poetry Review; and changes in the activities of the Society which were spurred on, to no small degree, by the fact of Mottram’s editorship. As repeatedly-re-elected Treasurer of The Poetry Society/National Poetry Centre, Bob Cobbing was involved with many of the practicalities of publishing Eric Mottram’s Poetry Review, and some of them are quite bizarre—ask him about the printer who was worried he was printing obscenity —just as he had been among those who made it possible for Eric to be appointed to the editorship in the first place. As an aside, anticipating future statements malicious towards Eric’s reputation, from at least one source, let me quote a message by Ric Caddel, dated 20th November 1998, to the British and Irish Poets List: ‘legends of a collapse-in-sales of Poetry Review in the Mottram era... have no place in a serious critical argument’. As Bill Griffiths has pointed out, the figures, such as they are, suggest an increase in sales. Sales are, of course, no indicator of quality anyway. When the Arts Council of Great Britain put the financial squeeze on all the Society’s activities, it was Cobbing primarily who got his head round the problem and came up with the solution we adopted, helped to found the Consortium of London Presses, and organised volunteers to set up and run the print shop which printed in-house not only Poetry Review but a mass of other publications under a welter of existing and ad hoc imprints. Cobbing, in the form of Writers Forum, published Eric Mottram’s first book of poetry, Inside the Whale, in 1970; and he continued to be one of Mottram’s poetry publishers until and beyond Mottram’s death with Local Movement (1973), Precipice of Fishes (1979), Season of Monsters: Poems 1989-1990 (1991), Inheritance: Masks Book One, Poems 1993-1994 (1994) and, posthumously, Pollock Record. Writers Forum also published Towards Design in Poetry in 1977. Eric Mottram championed Bob Cobbing in print with, among others, A Prosthetics of Poetry: The Art of Bob Cobbing in Second Aeon 16-17 (1973) and Writers Forum: A Successful Campaign in Ceolfrith 26 (1974) and Introductions to publications. Just before Eric died, I invited him to write a further appreciation of Bob’s work for what became the tribute to Bob Cobbing section of And # 9 with which we marked Bob’s 75th birthday. But of course that was, to my knowledge, never even started.
Page 2 and 3: Commentaries on Bo
Page 4 and 5: Contents Acknowledgements 6 Introdu
Page 6 and 7: Acknowledgements An earlier and sho
Page 8 and 9: That first essay, from over 30 year
Page 10 and 11: Review of Pattern of Performance (A
Page 12 and 13: Bob Cobbing at The Voice Box Cobbin
Page 14 and 15: Bob Cobbing at The Klinker (29th Ap
Page 16 and 17: Co-editing Word Score Utterance Cho
Page 18 and 19: It took Cobbing 10 years—or 20 ye
Page 20 and 21: • Do you use machines/technology
Page 22 and 23: I would like to see the visual inte
Page 24 and 25: Introduction of Bob Cobbing at the
Page 28 and 29: I shall quote now from a slightly-c
Page 30 and 31: espect. The contents are linear poe
Page 32 and 33: the level of the book rather than a
Page 34 and 35: medium may leave us more flexibilit
Page 36 and 37: Introduction to Bob Cobbing at Sub
Page 38 and 39: Ladies and Gentlemen, Bob Cobbing.
Page 40 and 41: silent. Then he turned intense atte
Page 42 and 43: Bob Cobbing: A Worker in Progress I
Page 44 and 45: It was during that time that I met
Page 46 and 47: Funeral Oration for Cobbing (11th O
Page 48 and 49: Celebrating the Memory of Bob Cobbi
Page 50 and 51: Bob Cobbing: A Talk Given at Boat T
Page 52 and 53: As well as the simplicity of approa
Page 54 and 55: The Destruction in Art volume recen
Page 56 and 57: themselves and not a completion in
Page 58 and 59: Reissue of Kroklok Kroklok was an e
Page 60 and 61: Republication of Bob Cobbing’s Li
Page 62 and 63: and the foreground of the image; an
Page 64 and 65: has been more difference in aesthet
Page 66 and 67: It might be that he changed his min
Page 68 and 69: So far, within a page, Cobbing has
Page 70 and 71: Review of With Our Tongue Our Drils
Page 72 and 73: criteria before being sure of them;
Page 74 and 75: Collaborations for Peter Finch Lawr
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The working order of pages changed
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Introduction to Bob Cobbing and Wri
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The supposed improvement in product
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inevitable. I am not sure it was so
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ut eye elements! A notional alien n
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However, there is functional writin
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There are those poets who inherit t
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I have included less on the 1980s
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word or any inflection of it; nor d
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making poetry than he had been. And
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he did formally, in a context of th
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And now as poetry more and more bec
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Another Story of Bob Cobbing Welcom
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Yet, as I have said before, Bob Cob
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Both afford ample evidence of Cobbi
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Bob Cobbing: A Talk Given at Boat T
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3. Published by Writers Forum in 20
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